I lived in rural Japan for two years, and there were a number of akiya in my town and this was 20 years ago. I wasn't aware property taxes are higher on vacant lots but that explains things. The akiya I saw were 100% beyond repair, they looked like something out of a dystopian movie.
I don't know the motive behind that tax law, but if they reversed it I bet a lot of those eyesores would be torn down and replaced with a little much needed green space. In my wife's neighborhood in suburban Tokyo there were several lots used as mini farms or fruit tree orchards. An infinitely better use of the space IMO.
Apparently the law was amended in 2023 to exclude abandoned homes from this tax deduction, as well as giving local governments more power to step in and take action on abandoned homes that present a risk to public safety. [1]
Probably still too early to say whether the change is having an impact, or how broadly it is being enforced.
My guess: tearing all those buildings down and dealing with the trash and demolished materials takes a lot of labor and possibly a "supply chain" (since you're presumably centralizing it for dumping/incineration). But the circumstances that got you into the situation are 1) shrinking population (small labor force) and 2) too much space in the countryside that people already consider low-value. Essentially, you don't want to incentivize a demolition industry expansion to clear land no one wants anyway; there are more important things to be doing.
Japan is pretty good at demolishing homes. Two homes in my neighborhood were demolished in the past month - and it took a small team of maybe 4-5 workers a couple days for each home. It also looks like a lot of materials were separated out to be salvaged/recycled, too, although presumably a lot of it gets incinerated or becomes landfill.
The cost varies, but according to this article [1] it is about about ¥1.2M-¥1.5M ($7.7K to $9.6K USD) on average to demolish a wooden house, although I suspect in rural areas it could be done for quite a bit less due to lower labor costs and not needing to worry as much about neighboring properties, directing traffic, etc. This reddit post from 5 years ago [2] says they were able to demolish an abandoned home and dispose of all the crap inside for ¥800,000 ($5.1K USD). So not exactly cheap, but not prohibitively expensive either I think if the government could provide the right incentives (e.g. combination of eliminating the tax reduction for abandoned home, and also maybe offer some subsidy).
It definitely makes sense to prioritize homes where there is some demand for the land, though. There's a home in my neighborhood that has been vacant for 5+ years. And if they were to demolish the home and put the lot up for sale I feel they could sell it fairly quickly (less than 1 year) and easily recouperate the demolition costs and get ¥4M+ for the land.
That it's economical at market rates is kind of the point, though, right? Without the disadvantageous tax treatment of cleared land, you'd see demand increase, which means either price increases or labor being pulled from other areas.
I disagree with the premise that the tax reduction for land with homes built on it exists to de-incentivize people from tearing down abandoned homes. Much the opposite - the purpose of the law is to encourage the efficient use of land. There are similar tax breaks on agricultural land - where unused agricultural land is taxed at a significantly higher rate than land that is being farmed.
I think they probably just didn't foresee a massive population decline coming when the law was originally enacted, and this was just an unintended side effect. Now the government views the huge number of abandoned homes as a social issue that needs to be addressed. And, as I mentioned in another comment up above, the law was already amended in 2023 to exclude abandoned homes from preferential tax treatment.
I do agree with your point that increased demand for demolition services will increase prices and probably divert labor from other industries. But I don't see this as a huge problem. The supply chains/expertise already exist due to Japan's historical preference for demolishing and building new, and it requires mostly unskilled labor (except for the guy operating heavy machinery), so it should be fairly straightforward to ramp up.
>I disagree with the premise that the tax reduction for land with homes built on it exists to de-incentivize people from tearing down abandoned homes.
Okay. You'd have to explain why.
>Much the opposite - the purpose of the law is to encourage the efficient use of land.
That's not the opposite of my argument. It's not even mutually exclusive with it.
>I think they probably just didn't foresee a massive population decline coming when the law was originally enacted
Since that would be 1950, that's plausible. But I think that actually also bolsters my case. 5 years post-war, the last thing the government would have wanted is labor going towards demolishing homes that didn't need to be, just because it would be tax-advantaged; the focus would have been rebuilding. Again, I think that it's plausible that this effect was the intention. However, what's changed are the circumstances, as you said. The law didn't keep up with them until the act passed in 2014.
For comparison, China’s vacant home problem is at least 5 times Japan’s.
China probably has so many vacant homes that even 1.4 billion people can’t fill, according to an estimate of a former deputy head of its National Bureau of Statistics last September [1].
If each vacant home is occupied by a household of 2.76 [2], there are about 510 million vacant homes in China. That’s 55 times Japan’s.
But China’s population is only about 11 times Japan’s. And vacant homes only multiply over time [3].
> How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people
> That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can't fill them
"Since the 1980s, China has built enough new housing to re-house the entire population but the construction boom has become a self-sustaining, perpetual engine of construction for the sake of construction – supply with no demand. And there are not just miles of empty apartment blocks but entire “ghost cities” complete with office towers, hospitals, schools, futuristic airports, museums, universities, libraries, theaters, sports fields, and miles and miles of apartment towers and subdivisions of McMansions – but almost no people. (20) Twenty-one percent of China’s urban residents, the wealthy and middle classes, own two urban apartments, some own three or four – all bought for speculation, not to live in, not vacation homes. More than 22.4 percent of urban apartments and houses remained vacant in 2014. (21) By one estimate, more than 64 million surplus apartments had been built in China, enough to house almost half the population of the United States, yet millions more are under construction."
A version of those huge stone coins found in some cultures. The "owner" of the coin is in name only, it can't really be moved. Value is stored via the knowledge of how many exist and who owns them.
For China's ghost cities: Each empty apartment has a unique address and an owner so I guess that counts as a byzantine form of currency too. Maybe the BOC could print "empty apartment" bank notes where it maintains the empty apartment on your behalf but you can trade the note in for the deed to the apartment.
What about stock shares.... eh let's not go there :)
The yapese Rai stones - A big part of mariana culture
That is a brilliant reference and I think good way to think about modern financial vehicles - namely that our species is still into necromancing our totems in order to give a dead object anthropomorphic spirits
I've heard the focus on owning properties is partly driven by how the Chinese government has placed limits on how much or how profitably Chinese citizens can invest in other options. (Deposits in a bank earning interest, stocks, etc.)
There's no credible estimates remotely alleging ~500 million vacant homes.
Excess PRC square footage in housing inventory is enough for 100-150m people. About 10 years of urbanization headroom. PRC continuing trend to urbanize from 65%->80/80% still has to resettle 200-300m to urban areas. This is without accounting for deprecated housing stock. Yes reality of speculation and (mis)allocation is much messier, but PRC is still 100-150m short on urban housing, they just also have a very wasteful 100-150m decade long housing runway.
For reference 80% urbanized US is short on ~6M homes, that's 2% relative to population. PRC gunning for 80% urbanization = PRC is net short 7-10%. Realistically much higher since a lot of people in rural stuck in very shitty housing stock. I mean that's their choice, and economics of relocating people who can't afford new homes is going to be... interesting. But part of urbanization goal is to move 100s in prexisting shitty tier5 homes into modern housing. Especially elderly whose going to be in <2 people households.
> If each vacant home is occupied by a household of 2.76 [2], there are about 510 million vacant homes in China.
Considering the literal rows of tents that pop up outside my apartment because so many people can't afford the fucking astronomically high rents here in America anymore, that sounds like a FANTASTIC "problem" to have!
It doesn’t fix anything. Rents in major cities like Shanghai or Shenzhen are proportionally pricier than even the priciest American metros. All these ghost houses are in places no one wants to live. On the same note, rent is pretty damn cheap in Toledo, Ohio.
>All these ghost houses are in places no one wants to live
Most of vacant units / under occupied development areas are where people fine with living, even speculative RE purchases has to factor in location to maximize returns. Hence empty units largely located just outside of ring roads of "city" where many people live, but rent between "decent" area and "prime" urban area is huge = many owners speculating on equity growth don't even bother to rent since ROI of rentals in these areas are very bad.
I've always heard that in Japan people don't generally buy a house to live in, preferring to knock it down and build a new construction. That seems like it would be an important contributor since this is more like how many empty lots there are.
Although it mentions urban houses, most of them seem to be rural.
I can imagine this is significant because japanese cities are probably very pleasant to live in, since they are safe and people are very self controlled.
(cities in the US for instance, generally have city benefits, but on balance require street smarts and caution)
> (cities in the US for instance, generally have city benefits, but on balance require street smarts and caution)
In many US cities the crime rate is below what it is in rural areas.
As a counterpoint: being non-Japanese and attracting the attention of the police goes very poorly. Some Japanese go out of their way to try and start trouble with foreigners, then claim you assaulted them, and bam, you're into a criminal justice system with a 99% conviction rate and some of the worst prison conditions in the developed world.
Japan's 99% conviction rate is a commonly quoted but also misleading statistic. It's misleading because it leads most readers into inferring that 99 people will be convicted out of 100 people who get charged with a crime. In fact the denominator is "people indicted by the prosecution", which is generally a small fraction of people who get arrested; more than two-thirds of cases have their charges dropped. The US conviction rate also appears low because it excludes plea bargains; if those are included, the US would also be above 99%.
This doesn't mean Japan's criminal justice system is good, it just means that its problems are overstated, and comparable to the problems the US is also dealing with. A difference in how statistics are calculated exaggerates the real differences between the two systems.
If you're going to go into it, you have to mention that you can be held for several weeks without being formally charged. That is to say, you can suffer a Japanese jail cell for almost a month (a significant portion of the strictly-enforced 90-day visa restriction, if you're visiting) and not have done anything wrong.
Yes, although it might be in your interest to not be formally charged, and they cannot hold you for more than 48 hours without due process. Within those 48 hours the police do have to inform you of the crime that you are suspected of (but not charged with), and if they want to hold you for longer, the police need to present their evidence to a public prosecutor. The prosecutor can request up to two 10-day extensions from a judge. The prosecutor and judge must both agree that there is sufficient evidence to grant the extension, and you will generally be present at those extension hearings. If the evidence is not sufficient for granting that extension, you will likely be released without any charges, and never factor into that 99% conviction-rate calculation.
So it's not like you can just be thrown in a cell for weeks without any explanation or any rights. And while you don't have to have done anything wrong, there at least needs to be evidence that you've done something wrong. Factually-innocent people in the US who find themselves facing charges with evidence against them often end up pressured to accept a plea bargain, even if they know they're innocent. It's a failure mode that both systems have, although they handle them differently.
I'm not saying it's fair, of course. A factually-innocent foreigner who doesn't understand the language, the legal system, or the situation they're in could easily slip up and end up confessing to a crime they didn't commit, or making any number of similar mistakes.
It's a sad story, but yes. I should have mentioned that the application to extend detention can itself take up to one day, so three days is the maximum time that the police can hold you in jail without a judge approving a longer detention.
It's certainly a travesty that this happened to that woman.
It’s pretty different crime. Rural crime is often “someone stole something from my yard” or “someone hit my mailbox with a bat”. City crime is “I was robbed at gun point” or “someone hit me with a bat”
How did you come to that conclusion? Did you look at any published statistics or just go with your gut feeling based on stereotypes? I suspect it’s the latter, because property crime in the city outnumbers violent crime by nearly an entire order of magnitude. This isn’t even considering how a large number of property crimes go unreported since there is a near-zero chance of the police doing anything about it.
Across the board urban and suburban populations have much higher (2-10x) more violent crime (depends on category). That said, many argue the robbery reporting rate is far lower rurally. Things like a broken mailbox is not at all reported.
True, but becoming less common as build quality increases. Setting aside woo-woo explanations (e.g. "people are afraid of ghosts"), the primary driver of this phenomenon was/is that older construction isn't up to code, and costs more to bring up to code than to knock down and rebuild.
Houses with more intrinsic value -- for example, traditional timber-frame homes, or machiya in Kyoto -- have more interest for remodelers, even today.
A cultural preference for new-build is not woo-woo. Americans will pay more for a lower-quality "new" car than a higher-quality "used" one, do you consider that woo-woo?
Pay more for a lower-quality car than a higher-quality one. Marketing and other social conditioning, so woo-woo sounds about right. While there are certainly reasons to buy new cars over old in many cases (features, maintenance & ongoing costs), the main driver for new cars is prestige. In Thailand for instance, you wanted to leave the red dealer plates on for as long as possible, because everyone could see you have a new car.
> They probably have the strictest earthquake codes in the world.
They do now, but a lot of these old houses that nobody wants predate them. The big earthquake-resistant building codes came in 1981 and 2000.
Nobody would think anything of buying a house from 1980 in the west, but in Japan I would never do it (a large factor in the death toll of the Noto quake earlier this year was the high level of pre-1981 housing stock in the area).
As newer, safer, houses start filling up the used housing stock I can totally see attitudes slowly changing.
I follow an American car drifter on youtube who moved to Japan in '22 and I've been shocked at how affordable his life is. He has kids and a wife and they'll go out to dinner and I think his usual bill is in the 20-30s for everyone.
He said it's super hard to rent a house as a foreigner there, he lucked out and found a landlord that knew him from youtube and leased an absolutely beautiful townhouse for $1800 that would be well into the $5ks in my city. Glass garage doors, just decked out.
Fruit though, he loves to show how expensive the fruit is and it's shockingly expensive. Not exact here but we're talking like $10-20 for a single melon.
I'm not sure what city he's in, he seems to be IN a city and is in Tokyo a lot but I can't remember if he's IN tokyo. So maybe it's not Tokyo expensive but I'd always assumed Japan was incredibly expensive to live in, in general.
If anyones interested he has a bunch of videos where he talks about the move, house tour, etc. He's one of my favorite youtubers and I'm not even that into the drift stuff.
Those $20 melons (and it's not hard to find $100 melons) are for gifting purposes. Suburban neighborhoods will have little fruit and veg shops (yaoya) that sell all the fruit that's not perfect in every way at a steep discount.
Ordinary supermarket fruit is still very expensive. Perhaps not $20, but apples are like JPY150 each (I'm sure there are discount shops, but I'm used to getting fruit with my normal groceries).
"The number of homeless people in Japan fell 8.0% as of January from a year earlier to 2,820, the lowest level since data began in 2003, the health ministry said in a survey report Friday."
There have been lots of empty homes for a while now, so no, any 1 year drop in homelessness rate is unrelated. But the absolute number being low could be.
It may be an under count but probably not by any huge amount. Although there are a much larger number of people that are desperately poor.
Japan has a relatively low cost of living (especially in rural areas), reasonably good social safety net, low drug use, high levels of familial support, and other factors that make it remarkable. It's pretty hard to become homeless.
But even in the US, where all factors are far worse, there is a surprisingly small percentage of the population that is homeless. The absolute numbers are much smaller than most people would guess (even accounting for under counting).
We tend to focus and exaggerate homelessness because it is so visible. Poverty in general is a much bigger and worse problem everywhere.
Also even Tokyo has some extremely cheap housing options. They are not great, but at least roof does not leak too much. They might not have full niceties like big kitchens or showers or even bathrooms. But they are very cheap.
The bottom end is much lower than in west in general.
Doesn’t the birth death ratio in Japan make this easier to solve? Housing is constantly being freed up by deaths, but apparently not conserved by the government or non profit to house those without housing.
They also have massive societal pressure to conform and a ton of 24 hour businesses like internet cafes. It is likely that the definition of homeless being reported here doesn’t capture people who don’t have a stable address but would never come forward to be counted.
We just spent a week in Japan and did not stay only in tourist areas, my Apple Watch logged our walks as around 10-15 miles per day.
Over the entire week, I saw one obviously homeless person, one “maybe” and no encampments. It really was striking coming from the United States. ~3,000 homeless may be low, but they have drastically fewer than us.
The homeless tend to congregate in encampments. You'll sometimes see the rare one in a park or a station but usually you only see them if you happen to wander into an area where they've all set up.
Homeless in Japan don't panhandle or really bother regular people.
Go in late January, Shinjuku station, above Marunouchi line, 20-40 homeless sleeping in the main tunnel under Yasukuni-dori to get out of the cold. Go into the park behind city hall. Look in tbe bushes. See tents made from tarps. Same is true in many other parks. Also that park behind city hall hands out food to homeless people. I'm not saying Japan has lots of homeless people, only that they are there.
My impression from XX years in Japan is there is a strong ethic of "don't bother other people with your problems" so the homeless generally try to keep to themselves.
Upon what do you base that doubt? Wikipedia cites homeless advocates in Japan contesting the number, claming it's as high as... 5,000. Which is still pretty neat.
This is likely something that will happen globally, simply because of demographic trends.
Large cities will also be impacted, with a delay, as this is where most young and educated people choose to live, for obvious reasons.
In my opinion the housing market is the real demographic dampener, more than anything else, and it means that the long term trend for both demography and housing should be a slow oscillation around equilibrium.
Many young and educated people in a relatively small number of cities until they decide to start a family and then historically they moved out. One also wonders what affect more remote/hybrid work will have. My cohort in the late 80s basically didn’t live in the city unless that’s where their job was which it wasn’t in the case of the computer industry. There’s nothing inevitable about young professionals wanting to live in cities and certainly not staying there.
> until they decide to start a family and then historically they moved out
That's a mid-to-late-20th century North American pattern based on zoning restrictions, mortgage policies, highway development policies, and racial conflict. There is nothing inevitable about it, and Japan has had a completely different experience.
Remote work is also giving professional workers more leisure time, and many are putting more thought into where they live as not just a place where they sleep, but also where they work and socialize. Also, for the people who prefer living in cities, there may be shifts in which cities are desired. Many mid-sized cities in the US existed because of the physical proximity required for the jobs there.
e.g. In 2001 a worker may have moved to Cincinnati or St Louis because they got a job there. In 2024 a remote worker might move to NYC or Austin because they want to live in those places.
Or they might decide NYC is an incredible luxury if they don’t have a job in finance there.
As I say, we’ll have to see how it plays out. Obviously fully remote has become a decidedly minority mode (especially to the degree people worry their next job won’t be fully remote) contrary to what some expected during the pandemic.
> There’s nothing inevitable about young professionals wanting to live in cities
I think it's more likely than not that young professionals with money will want to live in places where they can easily access a large variety of quality products, services, and entertainment. Places where they can meet and spend time with other young professionals. Once they get families they'll tend to prioritize places with good schools, childcare, and support systems (their parents, doctors, etc) but I don't think being able to work from home is going to make people want to live too far from cities while they are young.
And the fact is that those good schools, for example, are in the orbit of some of the more elite cities much of the time. SF’s geographical constraints I think sometimes mislead people into thinking towns near expensive cities are all equally expensive.
Many cities that are themselves expensive have suburbs and exurbs, some of which are themselves very expensive, but others of which are much more moderate and often have decent school systems and may be within an hour for medical care or an evening’s entertainment.
> There’s nothing inevitable about young professionals wanting to live in cities and certainly not staying there.
Successful people wanting to live in cities at least until they retire has been the pattern for centuries. The postwar US weirdness of zoning and "white flight" is the aberration, this is a return to the norm.
Young people will never be able to afford a home by working, no matter how much they produce for the economy. It is commonplace now that young people at the workplace produce 5x as much as their older colleagues. But they are never rewarded for it.
What they will get rewarded for though is getting (somebody) pregnant. Then the parents of both the father and mother will rush in to help them get real estate and to escape the dead end of working.
In short, they can't afford to move out from the city until pregnancy opens the doors for them.
Reality is getting screamed at by a toddler while you single-handedly build a depression era shack in desert wasteland for 40k, while simultaneously working full time and somehow caring for your kids too. Spend your time tearing your hair out, essentially working 3 full-time jobs while paying for daycare, rent, and construction materials so despite all this work your financials go into a black hole.
My parents did send me a $100 Lowes gift card, so there is that. At least now I can do ghetto job of pretty much any building trade.
It's mostly that having a kid lites the fire under your ass, not so much others are helping because they usually don't.
My example is in the cases that young workers get any help at all. Some families do it old school and actually help their children without requiring pregnancy, but it's much rarer. And as you said, many families won't help at all.
I don't think that is true for older workers living today, but it was true on the 50s. The GDP per capita went up by more than 4x and yet it is those 50s people who have had an easy time owning a home.
Call it what you want. I see it all the time. And not many new slacker type jobs are being made, for young people to do the same. Every generation probably has the same percentage of people who don't do anything. The difference is that such a person who is young is a "neet" on unemployment, while such a person who is old collects a nice paycheck from a job.
In low margin or high intensity industries, you're not going to have anybody who doesn't pull their own weight, whether young or old. But for normal jobs, it's more or less the norm that a huge number of your long-time workers are doing hardly anything at all.
Everywhere except the SF Bay Area, Santa Cruz, Malibu, Boca Raton, and Maui.
I think it's simply a communication and logistics problem to match people from other areas to empty homes. If anything, Japan and such should explicitly incentivize and encourage migration to declining areas to ensure their own tax base.
> In my opinion the housing market is the real demographic dampener
As simple as it is, I never though of it this way. It makes more sense to me than the commonly accepted explanation that kids are a liability in modern life. Thanks!
It doesn't seem like it went into much detail but while many of these end up advertised to foreigners as cheap homes to buy, they're not really easy to just live in unless you already live and work in Japan. Simply buying an Akiya home and moving to Japan won't be sufficient to live there.
Someone with more knowledge than me could probably explain this better though.
A lot of the most ridiculous deals you see online require that you update the building. The whole reason they're selling the thing for pocket lint or the price of a cheap bento or whatever is because they don't want it sitting there rotting.
Local municipalities are going to be very skeptical of anyone without residence buying such a home.
I know someone who tried to pull that stunt and bought a house in Detroit for just a few thousand dollars. It really did not take the city all that long (less than a year for sure) to decide he was not going to fix the place up. They made him an offer he could not refuse -- give it to the Detroit Land Bank for nothin, or go to court.
I remember browsing real estate sites with friends comparing monthly rents in california to outright housing purchases in detroit. But the former would have amenities while the latter had ... adversities.
On the other hand, I also occasionally run across social media accounts showing condos available for purchase, not lease, in some more affordable wards of Tokyo and I seriously question if I should uproot my life here in the Bay Area, find a job in Japan, and then buy there. The cost difference for buying just seems so much better.
Of course that drastically over-simplifies the realities of moving to Japan and won't work for everyone but just a thought process I go through every so often.
Ok, I'm curious, so I'll ask the dumb question. If I were to buy one of these homes, how much of a bureaucratic nightmare would it be?
For the record I don't live in Japan and have no viable immigration basis. Nor do I have a clue if they have a "no foreign property ownership" law like the one Canada just got. I do speak rudimentary Japanese and could probably bumble my way through the paperwork.
By coincidence, I visited an Akiya in Nagano yesterday. It's not free, but it's very cheap. I will probably buy it (+60% likelihood). If so, I will spend additional 200% asking price on repairs.
Technically, I am resident in Tokyo but own and live in a house in Nagano. It had been empty for 6 years, but not abandoned when I bought it 2 years ago. Here is what I know:
- There is no residence requirement to own property in Japan. You can be domiciled anywhere.
- Even for a government-sold Akiya, you will pay some reasonable fees to realtor and scrivener.
- You probably will not be able to get a loan if domiciled overseas.
- Legal is not particularly difficult (compared to other countries). I have only done it in person, and cannot imagine doing it remotely.
- There is no option to do legal in English. You will need a Japanese speaker. Or at least let them explain the documents at your level. They will do so sincerely.
- If your akiya includes farmland, you will need to demonstrate a plan to farm it. If the plan is not accepted by local govt, or you don't fulfill the plan, the sale may be voided.
- It is generally not a scammy environment. ymmv.
Anyone thinking to buy property in Iida, Nagano please look me up.
I'm not looking to buy property but I wanted to let you know that it seems hard to look you up. You don't have an email or name on your profile and the username isn't very unique online.
I’ve seen stories in the Australian media about foreigners (Australians and Americans) buying these and restoring them. The story was set up by a couple of Americans who’ve set up a business assisting people to do it. Even taking into account the fact that they were trying to promote their business, it was clear that it’s not easy, but with patience it’s possible to end up with a pretty amazing house incredibly cheap - at least by, say, Californian standards.
The thing I found strangest is that some of the houses featured were in beach towns not that far from Tokyo. If I were a middle-class Japanese family, I’d be buying one of these as a weekender.
> The thing I found strangest is that some of the houses featured were in beach towns not that far from Tokyo. If I were a middle-class Japanese family, I’d be buying one of these as a weekender.
You can buy it, but what would you do with it? There are plenty of cheap hotels in those towns. It's like buying a boat - it seems like such a fun idea, but ultimately it becomes just another thing tying you down while you pay to maintain it.
I bought a couple pieces of real estate in Japan as a foriegner, and I don't think it's too much of a bureaucratic nightmare. There is a lot of paperwork, yes, and there are a lot of different taxes and fees involved. But your real estate agent would prepare all the paperwork for you and should be able to give a fairly precise estimate of fees in advance. All you really need to do is provide your signature/stamp of approval a bunch of times, and transfer the money.
You would also need to pay real-estate taxes, as well as any income/capital gains taxes you made on the property. Japan also has "neighborhood associations" [1] that coordinate/provide services like trash pickup and snow removal that you probably should join, although I'm not sure if its's legally required.
There are real-estate agents in Japan that specialize in working with international clients. Presumably they could streamline a lot of the process for you. There are also property management companies that could provide a lot of different services, such as basic maintanence, finding renters, etc. As someone who would be absent from Japan for long stretches of time, I think realistically you would need to pay for some of these services (unless you know someone who could look after the property for you).
If you're not Japanese, a lot of things will be a nightmare. Japan is incredibly racist and xenophobic.
It also has a criminal justice system that convicts everyone who ends up in court (being a Japanese judge seems to be easy street redefined) and prison conditions are terrible.
Oh, and if you're black, expect to be constantly followed/stopped by plainclothes police who will demand your identity card, while not identifying themselves.
Your sentence needs a lot of qualifiers. i.e. Older Japanese are incredibly racist to Koreans and Chinese, and also mildly xenophobic. Even then, the racism and xenophobia get played up a lot in western media (or at least anime fandom). It'd be like insisting every American is like Old Man Jonathan Joestar swinging his arm in the airport about how he hates Japanese people so much[0]. Were there a lot of Americans who hated the Japanese exactly in that way? Yes. Is that an accurate depiction of Americans? Not really.
Japanese criminal judges have a high conviction rate because of two reasons:
- Japanese prosecutors are extremely selective about what charges they bring forward and often drop cases for lack of evidence.
- Falsely accused Japanese will often confess to a crime they didn't commit due to social pressure.
To be clear, the latter is an active social problem. But it's not the one most westerners think of when they think of the Japanese criminal justice system.
I can't speak to the Black experience in Japan, so I'll keep my mouth shut about that.
[0] Keep in mind this character was last seen fighting a bunch of super-vampires alongside a bunch of literal Nazis during WWII
> Vacant land attracts higher taxes in Japan than land with buildings
A hell of an incentive to build or sell your land to someone who will build. We've struggled with land speculation in the US for longer than we've been a country despite an obvious solution being available to fix this. We really could benefit from taxing land value alone, regardless of the value of any structures on top of it.
There are lots of kinds of land. A vacant lot in a subdivision is one thing, but what about agricultural land? How about a wilderness land trust?
Incentives are a blunt instrument. They necessarily push in the wrong direction sometimes, because they’re dumb rules. Beware one-size-fits-all solutions.
Neither agricultural nor wilderness trust land are counted as vacant. There's specific zoning and tax rules in most municipalities for them.
Land that is zoned for some form of residential, commercial or industrial use but doesn't have building is considered to be vacant.
The US doesn't have a shortage of land. However, vacant properties (residential or commercial buildings with no tenants) are indeed a problem in densely populated regions.
For some areas, it's because the city population shrunk and nobody wants to live there (Detroit comes to mind as a semi-recent example) but for others it is speculative investors who don't want to be a landlord and are just betting the price will go up.
Also a disincentive to not buy land to build on, because now you have to pay for the demolition of the dangerous pile of rubbish on it pretending to be a house to reduce the tax burden.
Why, after reading an article about a situation driven in part by this policy, do you believe it would have the opposite effects that it is currently provably having in the real world?
What are you talking about? The policy has kept housing prices low, exactly as it was meant to. If the cost of having housing as affordable as Japan's is having a few empty houses lying rotting in the countryside, it's one I'll pay gladly.
Taxing land value isn't the reason housing is cheap in Japan. This doesn't mean it's a bad idea, but the main reason prices are currently low is because 1) there's no economic bubble going on like there was in the 1980s, and 2) zoning policy here allows new construction of housing units on a huge scale to meet market demand, unlike other countries where zoning policy makes it very difficult to build new housing.
There are similar tax incentives in the US, e.g. homestead exemptions. A similar, if not better, effect could probably be achieved by adjusting these programs.
It would be cheaper for me to buy a rural Japanese property and fly there every summer for the next thirty years than it would be to buy a recreational property in nearby cottage country. Really goes to show how remarkably expensive things have become in Canada.
(As bad for the environment as this would be CO2 emission-wise, I have actually thought about doing this)
For anyone who is curious to see what kind of abandoned homes are available, this websites aggregates abandoned home databases from municipalities across the country. It's in Japanese, but works pretty well with Chrome auto-translation.
I personally would not recommend buying an abandoned home unless you are really looking for a lot of new worries in your life, but still fun to look at.
Japan's population decline does seem to suggest that they are going to have ridiculously affordable housing for the foreseeable future. But most likely a general thermodynamics of disrepair over the buildings to come as well.
Small / detached residential buildings have never really been valuable in japan, with exceptions: because of natural disasters either you could not expect the building to last that long, or by the time you went around to buy it it was not up to code anymore and you had to tear it down to build a new one.
Also while Japan's population declines overall, it also concentrates in a few metropolises, so rural land becomes cheaper, but also ever less attractive. Same with smaller cities. Japan is not going to have "ridiculously affordable housing for the foreseeable future", because the cheap housing is not where people are looking for housing. It's like saying that the US has affordable housing because NM has cheap land.
Relative to US cities, housing in Tokyo is generally pretty affordable. High end condos in the most hot/central parts of the city are still pricy but that’s a small percentage of available housing stock.
The places a friend of mine who lives in Tokyo has rented over the years have all been considerably nicer and sometimes larger than what one would get for the same price in SF, LA, or NY while still being in walking distance of essentials and a short train ride away from any part of the city.
Maybe don't buy property as an investment, but if someone actually wants to live in Japan, finds a nice bit of land, and can affordably build a nice place for themself in a small town or countryside I doubt the declining population is going to make them think twice.
>Maybe don't buy property as an investment, but if someone actually wants to live in Japan, finds a nice bit of land, and can affordably build a nice place for themself in a small town or countryside I doubt the declining population is going to make them think twice.
Im going that extra bit here. You dont want to own even in non-investment purposes.
You propose some solitude life, but that will be a rather bad decision as people will tend to move into the cities because of affordable housing.
> Nevertheless, interest among foreign tourists in experiencing a stay in traditional Japanese accommodation is high, with demand currently outstripping supply, notes Sakata.
A few years ago I noticed that Universal Studios in Japan, and nearby hotels, are cheaper than in LA. (I want to go to Super Mario World.)
Unfortunately, flying my family to Japan is super-expensive.
Anyway, this article makes me want to stay in a converted house in Japan.
Just about everything in Japan is cheaper than in the US (esp. LA), sometimes dramatically so. It's not really that Japan is that cheap; the problem is that the US is just horrifically expensive these days, and Americans haven't quite figured that out yet.
The problem isn't inflation. The US was horrifically expensive well before the pandemic and the inflation it spawned. Americans think it's all normal: they think it's normal that medical care and medications cost a fortune, that an ambulance ride costs thousands, that you're supposed to "tip" 20-30% for service when you eat in a restaurant instead of just paying the advertised price, that there's huge but hidden taxes in many places, such as with hotel rooms, etc etc.
The tide has shifted over bringing in "temporary" workers for service industries. Convenience stores, hotels, restaurants etc are increasingly staffed by Nepalese, Vietnamese, Taiwanese etc.
However, Japan remains very resistant to accepting permanent immigration.
If you're a highly skilled worker, Japan is one of the easiest countries to immigrate to. Far, far easier (and cheaper) than immigrating to America. For unskilled workers, not so much, but it is easier for them to come work here than 10 years ago.
I don't know the motive behind that tax law, but if they reversed it I bet a lot of those eyesores would be torn down and replaced with a little much needed green space. In my wife's neighborhood in suburban Tokyo there were several lots used as mini farms or fruit tree orchards. An infinitely better use of the space IMO.